The freedom fighter never lost a “passenger” through the Underground Railroad

When I moved from Canada to Chicago what I saw was distressing. Chicago is gracious, with parks along Lake Michigan and a respect for the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe — certainly more physically impressive than the urban confetti of Toronto. But it is segregated: a large black community live in poor neighborhoods to the south while whites reside in the affluent north. Criticisms about Toronto’s cityscape aside, I was privileged to grow up in such a diverse place. In Chicago, the marked separation of black and white is startling.

I began to understand more the longer I lived there — how job-seeking Southern blacks had moved to the industrialized north during the last mid-century and were racially ostracized and pushed into certain neighborhoods. Having witnessed those racial divides, and because it is Black History Month, I was drawn to Rosemary Sadlier’s Harriet Tubman, Freedom Seeker, Freedom Leader.

Sadlier’s biography seems, at first, to be written for those with absolutely no background about the agrarian U.S. South in the 1800s. The information in the opening chapters is often repetitive — how often do we need to know Tubman was only 5 feet tall? The writing can also be elemental: “Each year the slaves were issued their clothes and Harriet received her rough cotton smock, but nothing else, just like the other slave children.”

Sadlier says she interviewed some of Tubman’s Canadian descendents and it would have been wonderful to know more about them.

I am quibbling, but it is lapses like this in parts of Sadlier’s book that give me pause. One gets her motives: she is the president of the Ontario Black History Society and has to explain the black experience to other, perhaps unsophisticated, audiences.

However, once you get past the short road blocks, Harriet Tubman becomes a fascinating read. Unlike Frederick Douglass, whose slave owner taught him the alphabet, no-one attempted to educate Tubman. She was lucky to spend her childhood in Maryland on the same plantation as her parents but at the age of about five she was hired to other families. (Sadlier guesses Tubman’s age because few slaves knew their actual birth days. Douglass adopted Feb. 14).

Tubman was an enterprising, intelligent woman who used some of her meager savings gathered from outdoor jobs to hire a lawyer to figure out how she could become free. Her master died in the meantime and she escaped, finding her way to Philadelphia.

Fleeing to northern states was the path most runaways took until the first Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 allowed slaveholders to demand their arrest anywhere in the country. Harriet and other free blacks devised escape routes to Canada to help fleeing slaves and thus the Underground Railroad was born. “Her bag carried the essentials for her trip: from the sharpened clam shells for protection…to the tranquillizers to quiet babies,” Sadlier writes. “She knew what safe houses she was aiming to reach and where there would be food for her group.”

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